It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside.

A team of physicists has directly observed a reverse shock wave of light in a specially tailored structure known as a left-handed metamaterial. Although it was first predicted over forty years ago, this is ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Every month, Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay fires her 20-foot gun in the basement of Harvard's Hoffman Lab, sending shivers through the concrete and steel structure that can be picked up by seismometers ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Currently, most nuclear fusion power plants are large, expensive projects that will take decades to benefit from. But a startup company in Vancouver, Canada, called General Fusion is taking ...

This beautiful image gives a new look at Stephan's Quintet, a compact group of galaxies discovered about 130 years ago and located about 280 million light years from Earth. The curved, light blue ridge running ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Delaware researchers in Sweden have launched a giant balloon taller than a football field that is now flying at the edge of space to collect data on cosmic rays -- the most super-charged ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A survey by the Chandra X-ray observatory has revealed in detail, for the first time, the effects of a shock wave blasted through a galaxy by powerful jets of plasma emanating from a supermassive ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Shock waves are a well tested phenomenon on a large scale, but scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory and their collaborators from Wayne State University and Cornell University have ...

New data, published today, disproves the recent theory that a large comet exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, causing a shock wave that travelled across North America at hundreds of kilometres per hour and triggering ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA is concluding a series of flight tests to measure shock waves generated by an F-15 jet in an effort to validate computer models that could be used in designing quieter supersonic aircraft.